Fendi / Spring 2013 RTW

Search a show by:

“Karl, it’s good. Flawless. Everything is perfect,” said Sharon Stone to Karl Lagerfeld backstage at Fendi just before the show, while he was dealing (with his usual brilliant rapidity) with a phalanx of admirers waiting to say hello. “I hope so,” he called over with a laugh to Stone (who looked, it has to be said, very Basic Instinct 2.0). “It’s too late to change it now, darling.” There speaks a man who can say that simply because he knows nothing needs to be changed. This was one of those upbeat, positive, faster-than-the-speed-of-light Fendi collections, an athletically powered processing of the notions of spatial geometry and dimensionality fused to the house’s traditional and time-honored artisanal skills. Lagerfeld giving us one of his recurrent jolts to “luxury” so that it doesn’t sink into the morass of banality. Many of the furs were a combination of the likes of mink and broadtail fused with neoprene, while others were constructed with marquetry techniques, resulting in colorful striations and patterns with a 3-D effect.

You can, however, safely ignore the theory, and take on board that it led to some deft reimagining of Fendi’s most iconic bags—the Baguette, the Peekaboo, the 2Jours. They’ve been stripped of their logo-ified buckles, reducing them to striking architectural forms, colored scarlet, dove gray, cobalt, and terra-cotta, or embellished with tiny bumps akin to the raised surface of Lego bricks. As for Fendi’s new and as-of-now-nameless bag, that’s a small zippered cube suspended from a hand strap—it’s like part of a Rubik’s Cube. And there was certainly a playful toylike quality to the shoes, whose high block heels were covered in pyramid studs, their multi-paneled uppers able to be altered at the wearer’s whim.

Of course, with all the stripes, banding, and interplay between architectural shapes and sculpted volumes that have been all over the runways, the story of spring is shaping up to be about just how graphic fashion can look, and no more so than at Fendi. “Duality,” said Silvia Venturini Fendi, who collaborates with Lagerfeld on the house’s collections. “That’s why the skirts are two different lengths. It’s about bringing two different elements together.” Those skirts were certainly some of the most effective (read: wearable) versions of a trend that has hotfooted its way from New York. Yet sometimes the idea of dualism was more simply, but no less strongly, expressed like a curve-shouldered white cotton blouse with a geometrically patchworked leather pant and sky blue sweater dress, its surface configured in a honeycomb effect, over a crisp shirt. Flawless, Ms. Stone? Well, yes, there were moments of that.